Wild Ginseng Market Prices
Answered by: Richard Alan Miller
Question from: Nick Dumitru
Posted on: June 17, 2006

I have a friend with a large wooded property. He may have wild ginseng available on his land. I was wondering if you purchase ginseng from local suppliers and what the current price is.

I am not a buyer, but a broker who finds buyers for your products. This means I set up sales in larger quantities than usually one person is capable of wildcrafting. Most of my ginsengs are forest grown (COG), and constitute larger volumes. Current prices are down, with a 4-year old root selling for US$26/lb., FOB

I expect those prices to go back up in the next two years, as this root was normally positioned at US$95/lb. in years past. Wildcraft prices are all over the place, ranging from US$200 to upward of US$350. This is depended on the individual local buyer, market trends, and points of scale on the ginseng.

This market is VERY limited nowadays, and hard to find anyone willing to pay these kinds of prices for a root that may have the shape of a man with an erection. There are 32 different points on which ginseng are graded. I may someday even attempt a book on that subject, but mostly it is still a mystery in some areas of judgment on value.

If you give me the State in which you live, I could go into my database and look up local buyers. Since it has been some time since I represented wild ginsengs, this list is not as current as my forest farming efforts. I would recommend, of course, not wildcrafting this product, but turning it into a forest farming effort that was COG. That is the future of this crop.

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